The Comics Rack

Digression The Fourth

I've been quite surprised to see that Marvel has been trumpeting the 20th anniversary of the New Universe: one of the great failures of both Jim Shooter and Marvel. I was there in 1986 when the New Universe hit the shelves and, although there were elements among the titles that might have made a good series, I'm here to tell you that even today the New Universe was pretty bad...and not something that I remember either fondly or nostalgically.

I've always felt that the New Universe was, in some ways, an outgrowth of Shooter's early 80s suggestion that all the characters in the Marvel Universe be revamped (see Why aren't they getting older?). If one looks at the comic's career of Jim Shooter, one sees a leader and innovator: starting from his teenage days when he submitted story ideas to DC for the Legion of Super-Heroes to his first post as editor at Marvel, where he was able to bring the disparate parts of Marvel together and bring the company back on track (whether this was done at the expense of creativity, I'll leave for another time). Marvel grew under Shooter's stint as Editor In Chief and with Secret Wars, he shepherded in the concept of the huge company-wide crossover that not only paved the way for DC's Crisis, but for the constant Secret Crisis drivel that we see today.

But, driving Shooter, and an opinion I've formed without any first hand knowledge, was the desire to leave his personal stamp on any company that he has helmed. From Marvel to Valiant to Defiant and even Broadway, Shooter has been the point man and has attempted to be the main architect of each companies slate of titles. So, it is not a great stretch to assume that when he found the Marvel Universe was untouchable, at least from the point of few of the fans (and sales), the construction of a NEW universe would be the way to go. And, coincidentally, this is one way the New Universe was portrayed in the fan press of the time: that it would be established, grow and, eventually, supplant the Marvel characters that had been around for 20 plus years.

DIGRESSION FROM THE DIGRESSION: In his Afterword to the first volume of the Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus series, Mark Evanier makes mention that Jack Kirby had come up with the idea of wiping out the characters in Thor and replacing them with new ones. This idea never got off the ground, however, because Jack was steadily becoming disenchanted with Marvel in the late 60s and he felt the idea was too good to simply give it away. This concept of new gods and heroes eventually came together in the Fourth World series...a series that Jack originally had planned to present under the umbrella title, New Gods.

Many first hand accounts have surfaced over the years over how the New Universe project fell apart. Shooter's budget for the project was slashed by the corporate suits. It was hard to attract top talent to the books. One disaster seemed to loom as another was addressed. At the time, however, we, as retailers, only had the facts that were presented to us to work from. Marvel was starting a new comic line. All the issues would start with that magical #1. Although these were new titles, Marvel was outselling DC by a wide margin (see the article linked above) and we had to be ready for the (assumed) hordes of Marvel Zombies who would pick up most anything with the company's logo on the cover. The problem, however, was how many copies of each book should we order to satisfy a demand that might, or might not, exist; particularly since we had no idea of what the books would actually be like.

This was one of the times where we found ourselves in a real dilemma. You must understand that during this period of the direct market, we usually had to order 3 issues of a title before we saw the first one. The orders were carved in stone and once made, we couldn't increase or decrease our order. Unlike today, if you ordered too many copies of any given title, you were stuck until it came time to order the fourth issue and then you could make an adjustment. If you ordered too few, the system wasn't in place, like it is today, where you could increase your order and you were left to try other dealers, hope that the distributor had ordered extra copies, or, as we did, wait for the newsstand copies to make their way to the magazine wholesaler.

With the New Universe titles, we debated for some time as to what to do and finally decided to order above Uncanny X-Men numbers; our benchmark for high sales at the time. We did this across the board with all the first issues and then cut the numbers proportionately (around 50 copies each issue) for the second and third issues. What we hadn't expected, however, was just what a mess the New Universe would be. The art, in most cases, was fairly passable. But the stories...Yikes! Not only were the concepts a bit out to lunch (Kickers, Inc. indeed), but the stories, by and large, were poor. In fact, to be brutally honest, the New Universe comics were what one might expect from an independent publisher of the time...not from Marvel. Fans took a look at the comics and then put them back on the shelf with nary a second thought. The New Universe became a sort of standing joke: titles that would drive people to read DC. Even Shooter's baby, Star Brand, advertised as the main book of the New Universe, was terribly written and not well received in the least. My formula for cutting orders for the second and third issues was way off base and, looking back at it today, we probably could have safely ordered 75% less on each issue and I'm still not sure that would have been few enough.

By the time it was all said and done, the New Universe had a very small following and was selling around the level of the lower DC titles. Eventually, the books were, mercifully, cancelled and the entire experiment became an unfond memory. It is interesting to note, however, that while the New Universe books were arriving (and dying) on the stands, our sales on DC were steadily increasing across the board, leading many to speculate that the Marvel Age was on its last legs.